


The Christmas Waltz

by americanjedi



Series: Wee Doctor [4]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Christmas, Christmas is for thinking too much and music, Dreams, Gen, Melancholy, Stream of Consciousness, Thinking too much, Wee Doctor, so pretty much par for course of all my stuff, what season 4?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-27
Updated: 2017-03-27
Packaged: 2018-10-11 10:09:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10462422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/americanjedi/pseuds/americanjedi
Summary: Sherlock dreams to the tune of a Christmas Waltz.  Wee Doctor universe.





	

**Author's Note:**

> At some point all writers come to the end of working in a specific universe and I feel like I've moved to the end of writing in the Wee Doctor universe in a fanfiction sense. For those of you following me at thursdayplaid.tumblr, Wee Doctor OS is still moving forward.
> 
> I'm going to move all my Wee Doctor stories from tumblr to AO3, enjoy! This really is a bit rambly, so sorry about that!

It’s Christmas. 

Dark and lit by firelight. Cozy warm and smelling of the gingerbread John is helping Mrs. Hudson make down in her kitchen. Sherlock indulges in sprawling, in a bit of fingering old scars, reviewing a bit of mortification of the flesh.

It’s impossible to do with John there, he seems to forbid any melancholy simply by existing, and his hangers on even more so. But sometimes Sherlock needs to settle back in the almost dark, needs to close his eyes and just think. Ache a little. Listen to the CD that had appeared from somewhere (Rooster almost certainly) playing holiday waltzes. Feel the result of his penance, the sweet stretched out relief of it. The relief he has paid for missteps with John.

And before there was John, there was W, with his mysterious texts, a puzzle dancing just on the other side of Sherlock’s sight. Sherlock had obsessed over every comma, over every message - few as they were, reaching out through his homeless network, his contacts. Asking has anybody been asking about me, has anyone been curious? He pictured tall, thin, muscled, nondescript, fastidiousness, Byronic abandon, a sardonic smile, smirkingly clever even when that fit more with what he considered clever than the tone of W’s first communication. He twisted that assumption into himself, into John, into everything he did. Parenthetical. 

After he met the man, that careful self-control, it seemed ridiculous that he would ever confuse W’s thoughtful consideration, with any sort of self-importance. The way he slowed himself down for everyone else. W definitely had a swipe of sarcasm through him, the same self-satisfied wittiness that had John grinning at him like he’d performed some clever trick. But it didn’t bite, didn’t cut, didn’t have claws. It nipped, and teased, and tumbled before running off with a grinning look over its shoulder. Slid scalpel neat and sewed up after itself. 

Under other circumstances W didn’t strike him as the sort that would have too many friends, he was too good, too absolute, too discrete and deadly. But he was so incredibly kind, he’d never bat at Sherlock the way Moriarty did, would never have dreamed of it. Neither would he loom overbearing like Mycroft, swinging asides like parenthetical crowbars into Sherlock’s intellectual kneecaps like it was a game. The way Mycroft once swung. 

W stepped careful into things, touched gentle, formidable, at the edges of people’s lives. A man catching lemmings, throwing the proverbial starfish back into the ocean.

Self-worship had been Sherlock’s fatal flaw when it came to W, assuming brilliance had to look like himself, like Mycroft, like Moriarty; he hadn’t had the creativity to consider what W could have been. Hadn’t the good sense to read what was sent to him. And all the wasted time. Sherlock could have met him so much sooner, could have changed everything, but he hadn’t thought to ask the right question, took him far too long to think on the right question.

Then John had been so fascinating he’d surpassed everything else for a time. This same bundle of contradictions and impossibilities, who carried a gun and gauze and greatness with equal ease. The little adventurer, an adorable mangle of PTSD and thrill seeking. Little calloused feet and little calloused hands and heart. Sherlock had handled that badly as well. The shocked wonder at the boy performing surgery, cutting someone open and doing things to their organs, with that ready practiced ease had made him indiscreet. The little surgeon and the child, Bailey, screaming out trauma in every line of his body and John going on, shouting out directions to his nurse. Calling Sherlock an idiot like he meant it. John acted so adept at being adult, mimicked his father so often Sherlock had forgotten he was a child alone. Robbed of his father and rejected by his… colleague? Friend? Home.

The terror of losing John had turned Sherlock useless; selfish, clumsy, cruel. He still held W in comparison to Moriarty in his head. Still held onto the idea W was a genius in the key of Holmes.

Sherlock opens his eyes to the orange cast room, looks up, and there he is. That face Sherlock saw for such a short time. The form that John will grow into, grow up toward. The room is warm and soft. W stands in dark and in light. An island in the midst of 221B.

The music still plays. It’s possible Sherlock is dreaming.

"Will you stay?" Sherlock asks anyway and afterward is sorry he did. It’s not good to say so much, to give so much away.

W says nothing. He looks down, in the light and in the dark. He’s dressed in red and green, even now blending into the Christmas season. His hands twist around a crystal tumbler. The firelight makes the crystal sing, turns it into a warm star. W never could keep his hands still. At least not in Sherlock’s limited experience. It had been limited, hadn’t it? Blinking, hazy, Sherlock watches W fade back into the warmth of the room. Blending into everything. His eyes and the buttons on his shirt glimmer like the night sky in the Christmas lights. The Christmas Sherlock’s trying to give W’s son. The son that W trusted him with, no one had ever trusted Sherlock with so much; most days he was hardly trusted with himself. But the small, fierce and fragile bundle that was John Watson…

W looks so alone.

He’s almost breaking Sherlock’s heart.

No, not almost.

“I handled things badly.”

“Don’t be a prat,” W tells him.

“How did I handle things?”

There goes the corner of W’s mouth. “I seem to remember you stole my clothes.”

“Not all of them,” Sherlock grumbles.

“Now don’t misunderstand me,” John laughs. “It was an excellent plan with pretty good execution.”

“I would have found you if you had been what I thought you were. The missing medical supplies. But then you knew I’d notice. Obvious Molly’s drawers had been rifled through.”

W smirks at the accidental euphemism. Still, he says, “Manners.” The word curls out of his mouth exactly as it curls out of Bad Davey’s.

“I didn’t mean that.”

W’s mouth curls up smug at the corners, neat and elegant.

“I didn’t know you liked innuendo.” 

W waits, watches. Tilts his head to the side like a question.

“I put your sense of humour together from what I’ve observed in your sons. John’s jokes, Bad Davey’s affection for catching me in my word. You don’t like to take too much too seriously. I’d have had you laughing at crime scenes.”

“Would you?”

“I- Yes. You don’t need to call me a prat again. I stole your clothes and you let me fix you. Everything so well scheduled and executed and you took time for a crime scene. For me to help you. You would have laughed with me.”

Looking down again, W swallows. He looks fuzzy where Sherlock can’t remember him.

"You let yourself be alone for me, and your sons. You were so alone and you trusted me so much." He almost said love. That warm unflinching love that is the great secret of the human race, handled like a secret flame. W asked nothing of Sherlock, but that Sherlock be happy, and Sherlock wants, more than anything, to prove he could have tried to be a good person. It is a complicated benevolence, and Sherlock is afraid to say anything, even in a dream, for fear of ruining the natural balance of their symbiosis. Almost as if they’d sworn some oath to each other to protect each other with distance. The only way W could have been his friend was at a distance. Still, that distance hadn’t needed to be so far. He covered his face, “You were so patient.”

W chuffs out a laugh, “Everyone says nice things about people after they’re dead. They forget what the person was like.”

“I didn’t forget that much. I made a mess of things while you were alive.”

“Well,” W smiles. “I’m not going to argue with you, but I’m not going to agree with you either. You didn’t know me very long, you had no way of knowing what I was like. You’re a product of yourself after all.” 

“I didn’t ask the right question.”

“This again?”

“I’m afraid sometimes for the rest of my life,” Sherlock sighs.

“At least you know the question now.”

“Will I ever get the answer?” He already has the answer, he’d watched it. He just couldn’t understand it. The answer to that question has him running in place. Has him pretending W is near. Pretend that the answer is that W cared about him. Pretend the answer is he is worth the trouble of sentiment.

W looks down, it’s John superimposed over the figure of the most remarkable man to ever live. That worried brow, the catch of light on the tipped up nose, the thin fret of the lip. Like a child wanting to be cosseted very, very much, but expecting to be scolded. It is tender and good beyond Sherlock’s ability to describe, like a head against his shoulder and an arm draped across his back. The weight grounds him. His eyes flutter open.

"You were dreaming," John says from where he leans on the arm of the air. His hand on Sherlock’s shoulder relaxes a little now he sees Sherlock is awake. "It seemed like a sad dream."

Sherlock only hums.

“Come on. Its Christmas. Don’t be so far away.”

Sherlock sighs, leans his head so it rests against the crown of John’s head. “I won’t leave you alone,” he says quickly, twists and leans so he’s tucked John under his chin and protecting the curvature of the back of John’s head with one hand. “I’m too selfish to leave you alone.”

John is small and John clings with both hands, not as small as they used to be. John still needs him too.


End file.
